Pininfarina Sintesi-Hottest Electric Car Designer to Speak at the Sarasota International Design

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Sarasota, FL, United States, 2008/10/07 - Franco Lodato, Businessweek writer and designer, will discuss, during the next Sarasota International Summit, his latest creation electric car. Lodato will discuss how the design of the car relates to the needs of hyper-connected drivers.

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Franco Lodato, Managing Director at Pininfarina Extra USA, will discuss his team’s latest creation, the Pininfarina Sintesi, at Ringling College of Art and Design’s Sarasota International Design Summit Oct. 27-29. The Sintesi is a much-anticipated, highly-publicized, four-passenger electric car that debuted just a few months ago. The car is based on new technologies that allowed designers to shape the car around the occupants. Lodato will discuss how the design of the car relates to mobile communications and the needs of today’s hyper-connected drivers.

Lodato’s recent design work on the Maserati Birdcage 75 won the prize for Best Concept Car at The Geneva Car Show in March 2005 and the Concourse d'eleganze at Pebble Beach USA in August 2005.

Lodato’s prior positions include Professor at the University of Montreal School of Design and vice-president of design, exploration and development for Herman Miller Inc. At his former position, as chief designer for Motorola iDEN Subscribers Group, Lodato was the design strategist and visionary of new phones and co-branding for Sprint Nextel products and its partners worldwide.

Also speaking at the Summit during the session with Lodato and Walter Bender, founder of Sugar Labs, which designs open source operating systems for children and is in use on the One Laptop Per Child personal computer, is Steve Hamm, senior writer for BusinessWeek’s information technology section. Hamm has been writing about the information tech industry for 20 years, first in Silicon Valley and now from New York. His blog, Globespotting, focuses on innovation, globalization, and leadership.

Hamm’s forthcoming book, The Race for Perfect: Inside the Quest to Design the Ultimate Portable Computer, has just been published. At the center of this tale is the story of a single product, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X300 laptop. Lenovo, the first Chinese company to seek to establish a global consumer brand, bought IBM’s PC division in 2005 primarily to get the company’s storied ThinkPad laptops. The X300 was conceived as a “halo” product that would draw customers to Lenovo’s entire line.

Woven through The Race for Perfect is a case study of how this ambitious company, with teams in Japan, the United States, and China, marshaled its resources to pursue laptop perfection. As X300 came close to the finish line, it collided head-on with Apple’s super-slim MacBook Air—-with surprising results.
Lodato, Hamm, and Bender’s session will take place during the Sarasota International Design Summit from 11:00 am. to 12:30 pm. on Oct. 27 at the Ritz Carlton, Sarasota (sarasotadesignsummit.com). Their discussion will address the commonality between the design thinking that goes into designing the communications features in an automobile and the features in a laptop computer designed specifically for children in emerging nations. Hamm will moderate and frame the context of the themes of the conference--how the hyper-connected, mobile, wireless society is changing work, education, family time, and leisure and all of the products and services that enable them.

About the Sarasota International Design Summit Ringling College of Art and Design’s Sarasota International Design Summit is an annual gathering of designers, entrepreneurs, technology professionals, and thought leaders from diverse disciplines. Over the course of three days, we explore the increasingly important role of design and design thinking in shaping technology innovation in various industries.

This year’s theme is Design + Technology: Visual. Social. Mobile. We’ll learn how innovative people and organizations across the globe are transforming the way we communicate and collaborate with the latest information visualization techniques, social media, and mobile technologies. The conference will be held at the Ritz Carlton Sarasota and the Ringling School of Art and Design. For more information about the summit or to register visit the website.

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